Small capitalization stocks are known to have asymmetric risk across bull and bear markets. This paper investigates how variance risk affects international equity diversification by examining the portfolio choice of a power utility investor confronted with an asset menu that includes (but is not...

This paper presents evidence of persistent 'bull' and 'bear' regimes in UK stock and bond returns and considers their economic implications from the perspective of an investor's portfolio allocation. We find that the perceived state probability has a large effect on the optimal asset allocation,...

This paper shows that many of the empirical biases of the Black and Scholes option pricing model can be explained by Bayesian learning effects. In the context of an equilibrium model where dividend news evolve on a binomial lattice with unknown but recursively updated probabilities we derive...

Despite its important role in monetary policy and finance, the expectations hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of interest rates has received virtually no empirical support. The empirical failure of the EH was attributed to a variety of econometric biases associated with the single-equation...

Welfare gains to long-horizon investors may derive from time diversification that exploits non-zero intertemporal return correlations associated with predictable returns. Real estate may thus become more desirable if its returns are negatively serially correlated. While it could be important for...

This paper extends the literature on analyst optimism. Our analysis of a large sample of recommendations issued from 1995 through 2006 indicates that sell-side analysts are likely to assign frequent and favorable ratings to a stock after the analysts' affiliated mutual funds invest in that...

This Paper studies the relationship between civil war and private investment in a poor, resource abundant country using microeconomic data for Angola. We focus on diamond mining firms and conduct an event study on the sudden end of the conflict, marked by the death of the rebel movement leader...

This paper develops a flexible approach to combine forecasts of future spot rates with forecasts from time-series models or macroeconomic variables. We find empirical evidence that, accounting for both regimes in interest rate dynamics, and combining forecasts from different models, helps...

This paper presents results from recursive modeling of nonlinear dynamics in UK stock returns. A specification search suggests a two-state model and we demonstrate the ability of this model to capture time-varying volatility, skew and kurtosis in UK stock returns. An out-of-sample forecasting...

Recent evidence suggests that the parameters characterizing the implied volatility surface (IVS) in option prices are unstable. We study whether the resulting predictability patterns may be exploited. In a first stage we model the surface along cross-sectional moneyness and maturity dimensions....